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Over one billion people live in informal settlements in towns and cities of the Global South. Many of them are women and many of them are living in unsafe and insecure housing. Finding new options that are effective at scale for these populations is central to addressing the challenge of achieving gender-just cities. This chapter reflects on the experiences of one social movement seeking to support such a transformation, namely Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI). It elaborates on SDI’s goals and introduces their work to address the interests and needs of some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged urban citizens. It elaborates on the evolution of their strategies as some of the first attempts to secure gender justice proved limited, particularly in relation to getting to scale. To illustrate the experiences, we describe and analyse events in Zimbabwe, where the partnership of the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and Dialogue on Shelter (referred to below as the Zimbabwe Alliance) is actively taking up and using SDI approaches.

SDI is a transnational network of homeless and landless people’s federations set up to 1996 to ‘unite and empower the urban poor to articulate their own aspirations for change and develop their capacity, from the local to the global, to become critical women-led actors in the transformation of their cities’. 1 SDI is currently working with grassroots organisations in over 30 countries in the Global South and activities primarily focus on informal settlements. As elaborated below, SDI’s processes of capacity development are centred on practical interventions that nurture experiential knowledge. These interventions …